Man Who Was Late (2 page)

As Ben began to take modest steps toward prosperity, his continuing and acute observation of the world, and of his own image in every available mirror, revealed the imperfections of the Brooks style: trousers too long in the crotch and dismally flapping about the ankles when they should have gracefully broken over the shoe; the middle button in a suit coat placed less than an inch below the sternum; the disgrace of a vent that, resisting all home remedies—safety pins, stitches secretly added at the top by his own hand to fasten the damn
thing in place—refused to remain closed and instead spread revealingly over the wearer’s buttocks. The litany of these small tragedies was long. They brought him to search for a tailor, a search he conducted in Paris, where his work increasingly took him, in preference to London.

He confessed to me that the inconvenience of having fittings in a city he visited rarely was only a part of the reason: he was not quite ready for a Savile Row silhouette; Rachel would have teased him mercilessly; according to her dictum, he was not “white” enough to be stylish. He could justify a Paris suit on the grounds of wanting clothes that fit him specifically, and not each and every white-collar operative of roughly similar dimensions, and that, if he found the right maker, would look mystifyingly American, although of finer quality and fabrication. At least, that’s how he imagined it and that is how, after much study of guidebooks and gossip, he stumbled into the establishment of Monsieur Jeanne, an improbably named, French-speaking English tailor established in a shop on the avenue de l’Opéra.

There, the books were kept and the advance, before credit could be established, was demanded by Monsieur Jeanne’s equally English wife; bolts of the heaviest English woolens lay on mahogany tables; on the walls were pictures of General de Gaulle and Guy de Rothschild, and also of lesser luminaries, with affectionate dedications to the man with a golden thimble. The General, according to Monsieur Jeanne, had used him for everything before he came to power, the Baron only for corduroy britches of a quality so superb that they could not be worn out. Indeed, the orders eventually stopped; the Baron would never need another pair. It hardly
mattered: Monsieur Jeanne was liquidating his stock. There was a
gentilhommière
near Poitiers where he and “la Mrs.,” as he called her, were spending more and more time, and where they would retire.

Monsieur Jeanne recognized Ben for the opportunity he was—unnaturally polite, seemingly indifferent to prices but terrified inside by the expense, ripe for trousers with “kidney warmers” climbing up the back, voluminous and admirably sewn—more unattributable and unrecognizable than Ben could have imagined. The only sore point was that, if they were totally different from their Brooks Brothers predecessors, they were also even more misshapen, requiring repeat visits to Monsieur Jeanne, which took most of Ben’s free time in Paris, prevented him from traveling light, put him in danger of missing airplane connections while he waited for his luggage to appear. Inside the suitcases were Monsieur Jeanne’s “patients”: on the way to Paris, this meant garments in need of surgery; their cousins traveled to New York for a test of the extent of their recovery. According to Ben, the operations Monsieur Jeanne undertook were like Peter Lorre’s work on Boris Karloff in
Arsenic and Old Lace:
the monstrousness of his creations increased with each session. All of this, Ben assured me—failure, waste of time, and expense—could be explained by bad timing. He had gone to a great tailor but had arrived late, after the tailor’s illustrious clients had left him for some other
faiseur
unknown to Ben. The bloom was off the rose.

Ben’s repertory of misadventures of this sort at times seemed inexhaustible; fortunately, it was also eclectic. Item: A great comic playwright, recently transformed into a French
academician, vacationing for the first time in Maine, befriended Ben. Together, they filled long and intimate evenings with gossip about Oriane and Baron de Charlus. The master’s praise of Ben’s memory and penetration were unstinting—even Rachel was momentarily silenced—but the master had decided he would never write again and was drinking as heavily and methodically as when he was at the height of his powers. How preponderant then were loneliness, and the wine and scotch that Ben dispensed, in the scales of friendship, even assuming, as Ben must, that the old man was somewhat glad to talk about Proust in his own language in the Protestant wilderness of a Penobscot Bay island—why else would he have trudged, day after day, across the wide, overgrown meadow to be, as he said,
du côté de chez Ben?
And why make a pretense of friendship when his power to terrorize hosts and guests and to dominate conversation seemed intact? How urgent, on the other hand, was the need to provide those regular feasts of lobster and corn, consumed in the company of the local gentry, for the wife who looked and talked like a pastry-shop cashier and for the spinster daughter who talked like the Communist high school teacher she really was?

It was too bad to ask these questions, Ben complained. Had Rachel’s friends only lent the master their summerhouse five years sooner, when he was writing his last play, there would have been no room for such debasing ambiguity and, besides, might not at least one of the endless discourses he had listened to been redeemed by an epiphany? But who could say that the master would have chosen him as a vacation friend in those earlier times? Ben thought it was far from
clear. When the playwright was still writing, he might not have had the time to spend with the young banker and his rich and elegant wife and his stepchildren (or the inclination to do so), whatever they put on the table or poured into a glass. He would have been instead conversing—in baby French and broken English or, as a last resort, through the pedant daughter—with those same producers, actors, and directors who later abandoned him when his star set, going off to lionize other men of genius as yet unknown to Ben, about money and professional subjects to which Ben and Rachel could contribute nothing. After the summer ended, Ben wrote several letters to the master, only the first of which was answered. And, having told once or twice too often the story of this encounter with greatness that had come too late, Ben never dialed the playwright’s unlisted telephone number when he was in Paris and never knocked on the door of the apartment on the boulevard Raspail, although the temptation came upon him each time he passed under its oval balcony.

To top it all, there was the matter of Rachel, which I believe he discussed only with me. I really cannot think whom else he would have taken into his confidence. Was it not there that he missed the chance of all chances, the prize sweeter than any other, the bliss of being loved by her? And was not that too a case of being late, arriving after others had raided the pantry of her affections and had left, in place of the sweet honey he craved, only the smudgy marks of their frequent passage? These older, well-traveled, and confident men (such, at least, were the ones Rachel named: such had been her late husband) seemed to have been pedagogues of merit. Not content to “show her the ropes”—Rachel’s
own colloquial expression, Ben assured me—so that there was no gesture or inclination of the body an occasion might call for that she had not already experienced and memorized, had they not also formed her taste in drink, books, and clothes, taught her the names of hotels to avoid in the principal capitals, walked at her side down the galleries of the museums where she in turn guided Ben’s novice gaze? The late husband had fathered Sarah and Rebecca, her queerly named, dangerously black-haired twins, and then was electrocuted in the course of some complex repair he was attempting to perform on the roof of his barn. Rachel was still in mourning, was actually dressed in black—a violation of Cambridge mores, but how could she forgo the thrilling contrast that widow’s weeds made with her improbably white, impeccable skin?—when they met at the home of a Bostonian classmate. In Ben’s freshman year, of the large-boned adolescents who mysteriously all knew one another, knew all the prettier girls at Radcliffe, and attended club punches, this curly-haired hockey player alone had manifested considerable and benevolent interest in his strange fellow student who talked like a book and seemed to know nobody. Ben was seated beside Rachel at the table; his eyes could not leave her creamy, lightly powdered cleavage. He was a drowning man; another moment, and he would plunge his face into it. His sentimental and worldly education were about to begin: Was not his tutor, mistress, and wife-to-be asking, at the end of lunch, whether he wanted to see her two-year-old girls, and did he really know fairy tales by heart, and would he come the next day to tea?

Toward the end of Ben’s sophomore year, Rachel’s widowed
father died. There were no brothers or sisters to share in the cornucopia of terminating trusts. The dollar was strong. Rachel took a large house outside Hyères for the summer—Edith Wharton’s former presence affecting the choice—and invited Ben to join her. A Harvard scholarship student to take care of the twins was just the thing; he would be like an older brother and supply the masculine presence needed for their correct development. She would pay his passage and a small salary. That there should be a salary confused Ben’s parents sufficiently about their son’s relations with the worrisome older woman from Boston. They gave their consent; Ben believed he must have it.

The house was, in the custom of that place, romantically dilapidated. Through the garden and a grove of parasol pines that prolonged it, one reached a shallow white beach. That is where, in the morning and also in the afternoon, after they had finished their long nap, Ben led the twins, rubbed suntan oil into their skin, engaged them in French conversation, and, when they tired of splashing in the water, fished for them
à la palangrotte
, five hooks on a line, with bits of bread as bait, lowered from a rock at the end of the beach so that the hooks hovered just above the sandy bottom, where tiny fish darted back and forth in the shade cast by the rock. During the twins’ nap, if there were no guests in the house, the cook watched the girls, and Ben and Rachel swam. At last, wafted by the Mediterranean swell, he was no longer a virgin: they made love beyond the rock, where their feet could barely touch, in Rachel’s room when she retired after dinner, in Ben’s bed when she awoke in the night and abruptly wanted him.

As it happened, Rachel was rarely without guests. The exchange rate had put wind into many people’s sails. Some of the great men at the helm of little magazines then beginning to bud in Rome and Paris came to Hyères in wheezing black Citroëns; others got off the train at Toulon, where Ben would meet them. They smoked Gitanes made with yellow paper, drank
pastis
in the sun and scotch when it set, and organized raucous games of
boules
under the dusty plane trees. They were friends of the writers Ben was beginning to read; later in the summer they would stay with those writers. The house filled with the boom of voices. When Ben joined in the conversations, he thought these well-pitched and resonant organs pushed his voice aside, as though it were a
deux chevaux
in the way of one of their automobiles. His accent had an overlay of strangeness of which he was always aware; it would glide out of control until, dry mouthed, he listened to his own words with panic, waiting for their end. The twins’ uncle, a Mainline Philadelphia doctor, sailed over on a chartered boat that Ben learned to call a ketch. He wore lime-green shorts and a faded blue shirt. The aunt’s face was covered with red blotches. They talked to Rachel about money and cruising: a world of summers he had never known, and, it seemed to him, he would never fully understand, yawned before Ben. He was late and would never catch up; their awkward careless grace was destined to elude him; his pleasures, his happiness, lay only between Rachel’s legs.

I have dwelt on this interlude because Ben himself returned to it so often in our conversations: he said it was the summer that determined the direction his life took thereafter. When
I questioned Rachel recently, in the course of writing this story, she agreed with Ben’s view; in fact, she supplied corroborating details I had forgotten or Ben had not mentioned.

At the end of that season of miracles, he returned to the States on the now-familiar student ship. As he made his way home, seasickness combined with bitter reflections to dissipate his sense of displacement and defeat. After all, was he not, although perhaps the youngest and least well prepared, at the head of his college class, and had not he won his place effortlessly, without care or plan, while the struggles of those happier classmates, rich with memories of golden summers, purchased mediocrity? Did not his thoughts outrun what the others trumpeted so confidently around Rachel’s table? And was it not he, once the Little Lord Fauntleroy of a Central European town with a name these Houyhnhnms could not pronounce, and now denizen of a Jersey City they smirked at, who slept with Rachel, whose cock was nightly sucked by her, who was so miraculously able to love Sarah and Rebecca and to be loved, yes loved, by them? What did it matter if all his younger years had been emptied of meaning by the New World? He would shut a gate of bronze upon them. The storehouse of all the shame and vulnerability in his life would be locked; a private museum of curios with but one visitor, himself, to stare at the degraded and rejected lares and penates. Only new acquisitions and artful forgeries would be on show. Clothes make a man and, with even greater power, so do lessons learned in the right sort of childhood. Within the limits of verisimilitude, he would have both; to his own skill he foresaw no limit. He repeated the
words of a sampler Rachel owned: “Give me, O Lord, Thy early grace, nor let my soul complain that the young morning of my days has all been spent in vain.”

A
S IT TURNED OUT
, the laying of Ben’s new foundations did not seem to involve many outright lies. If one paid close attention, one might notice, sooner or later, some of his strange zones of unreliability in recollection—when had he made a crucial acquaintance, under what circumstances had he learned to jump a horse (if indeed he knew how!), how could so many experiences appropriate for a gentleman have been compressed into the few years that separated him from the prehistory of wartime Europe, or from the nameless high school in New Jersey through which he had passed briefly on his way to Harvard and a New Life? These slips surprised in a man with a memory and a bent for precision as prodigious as his. But Ben was very careful; he would correct the occasional improbable inconsistency in dates and, in the end, offer explanations that, for all the envelope of self-effacing charm, came down to his having been in these subjects, as in all others, a rapid and gifted student. One surmised that he had quietly put himself through a crash course in living the good life—good above all in its difference from the one in which he had feared he might be confined. It was a course of such rigor that the boot camp at Quantico, which seemed to have taught him exclusively map reading and how to maintain a parade-ground posture, must have felt, in all but its physical-fitness drills, like a comfortable spa.